The Daily Scare
Strange
man predicts world will end on 21st December 2212 (around teatime).
It is beginning to look as if the world may not
in fact have ended as everybody had hoped on 21st December but may drag
on for some time to come.
Having secured an exclusive interview with my
personal shaman, the Venerable Yogi Peyote Shroom of the Ashram Armageddon, I
am able to bring you this exclusive which, fortunately, you will not be able to
read about anywhere else.
When I asked the Ven Shroom about his prediction
that the world would definitely and without doubt end at midday on 21st
December – a prophesy that propelled thousands of Brits to stock up on tins of
spam which they would not in fact be able to eat on account of their having
ceased to exist – the greatest Seer ever to have lived since the last one was
discredited explained:
“My prediction was entirely accurate and
scientifically based on ancient writings found on a latrine wall during the
excavations of the ancient city of Myopia.”
The Myopian civilisation was renowned for the ability
of its Seers and Psychics to predict the future until it was unexpectedly wiped out in 5026 BC.
The cause of the sudden vanishing of Myopia
remains as much a mystery to the archaeologists of today as it was to the
Myopians at the time.
Some say the cause was a meteorite which the
Seers predicted would hit the Earth. The
Myopians had just invented writing and this led inevitably to an ancient form
of journalism and so it was the custom of the time for everybody to consider
completely true everything inscribed on a stele.
Although the meteorite in fact
missed the Earth by a mere 100 trillion miles, the prediction caused everybody
in Myopia to panic, abandon their cities and go live in caves. By the time they
realised their mistake and tried to return to their cities, the Myopians
discovered that squatters had moved in and, by then the laughing stock of all
of South America – satirical cave drawings and graffiti on pyramids mocking the
Myopian debacle have been found in archaelogical digs as far north as the
Navajo lands of Colorado and as far south as the Tehuelche lands of Patagonia –
they were too embarrassed to argue the toss.
Others say the cause was incessant warfare
caused by the Myopian obsession with invading everybody so as to steal their
maize. This proved to be an expensive way of getting maize when it was cheaper
just to grow it themselves and so Myopia went bankrupt, causing everybody to
become fed up with their government – something nobody, even the most
enlightened Seers, Necromancers and Shamen, could have predicted – and return
to nature. Evidently nature was none too keen to welcome them back on account
of them not having treated it very well and so hit them with a sudden rise in
sea levels, which in turn caused them to migrate en masse to Mexico to escape
the damp.
Be all that as it may, I can report that the
venerable Shroom has explained the reasons for the slight error in his own
prediction:
“Unfortunately those of us chosen by God for no
apparent reason to enjoy the gift of prescience must always wrestle with the
fact that there are variables no-one can foresee. While they do not detract from the wise yet
inordinately depressing nature of our prophesies or the obligation of all
lesser mortals to believe everything they are told by people with beards – in
this case, me - they can get in the way of their actually coming true. Such variables can include typos in the ancient
calendars, forgetting that February only has 28 days, and other random
influences such as the predicted event not actually happening.”
The Venerable Shroom went on to explain that he
has just discovered a hitherto unnoticed footnote in the Myopian Calendar which
also predicted that the end of the world would actually probably be postponed
for a further two hundred years so as to give England time to win the World Cup
– unless, of course, it isn’t.
A splinter group of the Temple of Armageddon
yesterday set up its own sect, the Oracle of Transcendent Ambiguity. Its leaders explained that their own
examination of ancient Myopian scrolls indicate that the figure of 200 years is
erroneous, mainly because this is not nearly enough time for England to win the
World Cup.
However, while the venerable Shroom takes pains
to outline the unexpected developments that created the impression that his
predictions about the apocalypse were a complete cock-up, many of his followers
insist that he was in fact correct and that the world did end on Dec 21st.
They claim that everything that transpires from
that time on is a figment of our imaginations. A spokesperson texted me this
message from his spaceship (currently hovering over a mountain in Croatia in
the hope of picking up survivors):
“Although
the world as we are now experiencing appears quite real, you are all in fact imagining
it. So can you please imagine some
improvements.”
A recent Gallup survey suggests that the nation
is divided on the whole issue of the apocalypse: 31% of people are of the opinion that the
world is still here; 17% insist that it isn’t; 14% don’t know; 28% are
convinced it was never really here in the first place and 10% don’t care.
On December 21st, as the deadline for
the Apocalypse passed (or not, according to your point of view) the world was swept
by a tidal wave of disappointment. Millions of people had been kind of looking
forward to it because it is considerably less expensive – except for a hike in
the price of spam - than Christmas and other festivals of mass consumption so
favoured by the world’s money lenders, in which people are traditionally forced
to drink alcohol, eat strange puddings and be civil to people they don’t like.
The original Myopian calendar was based on the
principle that the universe goes in 10 000 year cycles, each one marked by the
celestial ascendance of one or other of their constellations and ending in
disappointment. The era just completed was marked by the sign of Soporifix the
ancient god of sleep and characterised across the span of centuries by the
desire of the inhabitants of Earth not to wake up any more than they really had
to.
According to the prophesies, we are now seeing
the dawn of an Awakening, a new era known as the Age of Sarcasm in which
millions of people leave sarcastic comments on Facebook or write sarcastic
articles about failed prophesies concerning the Apocalypse or, indeed, England
winning the World Cup.
This will be followed by the Age of Mirth in
which everyone will have a good chuckle at the antics of the denizens of the
previous ages.
And at some point in the far distant future
there will arise the Age of Governments-Not-Lying-to-Anybody, although this may
be cancelled due to budget cuts.
